Meet Me at the Lake

It was almost midnight when Will and I made it to the mansard-roofed Victorian where I lived. It would have been a grand home at one time, but its guts were now hacked into a warren of apartments. The smell of fried onions accompanied us down the gloomy, narrow hallway to the back of the building. I hoped Will wasn’t paying attention to the yellowing paint and the stained orange carpeting.

He leaned against the wall, hair plastered to his cheeks, while I struggled with the lock.

“My hands are slippery,” I mumbled.

We were drenched. The rain was so heavy that running would have been pointless. Instead, we walked quickly as lightning flashed in the northwest and the old trees that lined my street swayed in the wind, their branches thwacking the power lines.

Will followed me inside, and together we surveyed the tiny room that contained the whole of my life in Toronto. A double bed was pushed against one wall, the “kitchen” on the opposite. You could stand between the two and touch the counter with one arm and the end of my bed with the other. There was just enough room for a pair of vinyl-covered dining chairs and a little wooden table.

“Small would be an understatement, as you can see.” I wasn’t a tidy person by nature, but I’d learned to keep it neat. I made my bed every morning, washed the dishes after I ate. There wasn’t much to decorate, but I’d painted the walls a pale shade of mint and hung a couple of prints I found at a secondhand shop—a forest under an inky night sky and a donut ad that looked antique but certainly was not.

Will slipped off his backpack, his eyes traveling to a Grizzly Bear concert poster hanging above my bed. “It has a lot of personality,” he said. “It seems very you. The window is amazing.”

It was. It looked onto the backyard and had deep sills and a leaded glass pane across the top. It was what I liked best about the apartment—the hallway was ominous, but inside, the original hardwood floors and thick baseboard trim were still intact.

“There’s a claw-foot tub in the bathroom, too,” I said. “But the water pressure sucks.” Why was I talking about water pressure? Bringing Will back to my apartment had not been premeditated. Dancing was one thing—a step too far, probably. All I knew when I invited him here was that I didn’t want to let him go. But now what?

I scratched my wrist. “Well, I should probably get changed. I’d lend you something, but I doubt even my biggest shirt would fit you.”

“I think it would be a smidge small.” Will gave me an off-kilter half smile. “But that’s okay. My coveralls are in my bag.”

I pulled dry clothes out of my dresser, tossed Will a towel, and shut myself in the bathroom, taking twice the amount of time I needed to change. I brushed my teeth, slicked on deodorant, and twisted my body around in the mirror. I’d put on a pair of baggy gray sweats and another white tank top and a white bra. No silly business here. I waited until I couldn’t hear Will shuffling around on the other side of the door.

He was standing by the table, holding a framed photograph while rain pelted the window. His hair had been rubbed into chaos, and his sleeves were rolled past his wrists, hiding his tattoo once again. The walls appeared to have shrunk in around him. My apartment was not big enough to accommodate a Will.

“Is this your mom?” he asked.

The lights flickered.

I moved beside him, looking at the picture. “Yeah, and that’s Peter with us.” It was taken the night of my high school graduation. I’m wedged between the two of them on the lodge deck, the lake a blue blur in the background. Peter hadn’t wanted to be in the shot. I remember Mom whispering something in his ear and having the strange sense I was witnessing something private. Peter’s face remained placid, but he’d nodded and stood beside me, wrapping an arm around my shoulders.

“You look just like her.”

“I know. It used to bother me.” Mom had worn her hair short since I could remember. After I cut mine, the likeness was uncanny. I didn’t mind the resemblance anymore. I wasn’t sure when that changed.

“She’s beautiful,” Will said. My eyes swung to the side of his face, but he continued to study the photo.

“Your hair used to be so long.”

“Yeah, this is pretty new.” I twiddled a strand near my forehead.

Will put the frame down. “Was it always just you and your mom?”

“I don’t have a dad, if that’s what you mean.”

I took a step to the right so I could fill glasses with water. The kitchen was only a few feet of counter, a sink, an ancient gas stove, and a small fridge. I passed Will a tumbler and sat on the edge of the bed, kicking out a chair for him to sit in.

“My grandparents lived at the resort until I was twelve, but Peter was always around. He’s the pastry chef there. His days start early, so he’d be done with work by the time I got home from school. We used to have these tea parties when I was little. He’d make crustless cucumber sandwiches and we’d listen to Talking Heads and the Ramones.” I smiled. “One of my earliest memories of Toronto is having afternoon tea at the Royal York hotel with Peter.” He’d been trying to convince Mom to do a fancy tea at the resort—he lost that argument.

Will inspected the room again, his eyes landing on the closet. It was little more than a single-door cubby and so stuffed it wouldn’t close properly. “I guess you couldn’t start packing with your friend here?”

I flopped back on the bed. Whitney’s visit had given me an excellent excuse not to think about boxing up my stuff. “I can’t believe I’m going to have to live with my mom again.”

“Why do you have to?” I heard Will say.

I blinked up at the crack that ran through the ceiling. I could draw the fissure with my eyes closed. “Well, unless I want to bunk in the staff cabins, and I definitely do not, there really isn’t another option. The resort is kind of remote and I don’t have a car.”

“Right,” Will said. “But what I meant was, why do you have to go home at all?”

A crack of thunder saved me from answering. I jerked upright, sending a crushing pressure to my skull.

“We need some music.” I opened my laptop on the table next to Will, and the Brookbanks website stared back at us. Mom had called as Whitney and I were heading out the door this morning. She wanted our opinion on the new room reservation tool.

“Is this it?” Will leaned forward. The photographer had gone out in a boat to get the shot of the lodge sitting atop its grassy hill, the beach below. It looked like an oversized ski chalet, a three-story stone-and-wood château with a gabled roof.

“That’s it.” I clicked off the page and over to my iTunes, scrolling through my albums.

“What about them?” Will asked. When I turned to see what he meant, his face was so close, I could see an almost invisible smattering of freckles on his cheeks. I followed his gaze to the poster on my wall.

“Grizzly Bear? Sure.” I clicked on their most recent album. “I saw them at Massey Hall last year. Peter bought me tickets. That’s when I got the poster.”

I sat back on my bed as the first track began. “In my ideal world I’d have the space and the money for a record player.”

“And a brand-new Horses LP.”

“Exactly. But I’m very happy with my streetcar pin.”

Will tapped his fingers on the table. Our conversation felt stilted for the first time.

“If you could have anything right now, what would it be?” I asked to fill the dead air.

Will blinked in surprise, and a blush slunk up from under his collar. “I’d probably have something to eat.”

“You’re hungry? After all those nachos?”

“I’m hungry after almost everything.”

“Noted.”

I might have been able to open the fridge with my foot if I were as tall as Will, but as it was, I needed to get up to stare at its empty shelves. I hadn’t had a chance to restock after Whitney’s visit.

“I’ve got pickles?” I looked over my shoulder and noticed the paper bag on the counter. “Oh, actually. I have something much, much better.”

Peter had sent two loaves of sourdough down with Whitney, and there was still part of one left. “It’s not super fresh, but it’ll toast up great.” I held it out to Will in one hand and waved my other around it as if it were a prop in a magic trick. “Prepare to be amazed.”

“I’m not sure I’ve seen someone this excited about bread before.”

I stopped moving. “This is not just bread. This is Peter’s sourdough—and it’s going to change your life.”

“Is that so?”

The lights flickered again, and we both looked up, then back at each other.

“I guarantee it. After tonight, you’ll never be the same, Will Baxter.”

As I was getting our snack ready, a gust of wind toppled the garbage bins in the yard. The rain came harder against the glass, and my light dimmed, flashed once, then went out.

“Shit.”

“Do you think it’s only your place?”

I shuffled over to the window to check the streetlights, which had also gone dark.

“Nope.”

“You’ve got a bit of a serial killer thing going on right now,” Will said, his face glowing in the blue of my laptop screen. I was still holding the bread knife.

“Ah, you’ve figured it all out,” I said, raising it in the air. “I tricked you into thinking I was an innocent country lass.” I frowned, dropping the knife to my side. “The toaster is out of commission.” I chewed on my cheek, thinking. “I’ll just use a pan.” The stove was older than me and the back right-hand burner was broken, but because it was gas, I could cook in a power outage.

“Do you have a lighter?” Will asked as I was frying the bread. “I can do your candles.”

“In my bedside table.” I was so caught up thinking about the equation of romantic lighting plus Will plus small room that it wasn’t until he was opening my drawer that I remembered what was inside. “No, wait. Don’t do that. It’s in my bag. In the Ziggy Stardust pouch.”

Now my pulse galloped, and with every snick of the lighter, my skin felt snugger. Will lit all five of my candles, each nestled safely in a glass jar, delivering one to the bathroom and one to the counter next to me. Another went to the table, a fourth to my dresser, and the last beside my bed. When he’d finished, the room quivered with gold.

“Your laptop only has twelve percent battery. Should I shut it down in case the power’s out for a while?” Will asked, interrupting my increasingly attentive bread frying.

“I guess you better.”

With that, the music halted.

It was just the two of us now. And one plate of toasted sourdough.

I set it on the table along with a small ramekin of flaked salt and butter and took the chair beside Will.

“Put a little salt on top,” I said, demonstrating. I waited for Will to do the same before I took a bite, watching as his eyes widened. The sound he made, his mouth still full, was something along the lines of Fuuuuh.

“Peter made this?”

“Yeah. It’s what we serve at the Brookbanks restaurant.”

“Now I have another reason to get up to your resort. I’m going to shake that man’s hand and eat seven loaves of sourdough.” He took a bite and said while chewing, “The lake looked nice, too—maybe I’ll take a canoe out while I’m there.”

“Oh yeah? I’m having a hard time picturing you in the bush. Will Baxter in a canoe?” I shook my head, smiling.

He gave me a scowl. “I’d look great in the bush. Sensational in a canoe. You’ll just have to show me how to hold a paddle.”

“How about this: I’ll take you out in a canoe, teach you how to do a J-stroke, and make sure you don’t embarrass yourself. But in return, you have to show me your drawings.” If we were going to play make-believe, I might as well shape the fantasy how I liked.

“You want to see my work?”

“Yeah.” I sucked butter off my fingers. “So bring your portfolio when you come.”

Will pushed his cheek out with his tongue, regarding me. “I could show you now.”

I paused, index finger still in my mouth.

“I have a sketchbook with me,” he said. “I always carry one around. It’s mostly ideas for Roommates. There are a few portraits.” He shrugged. “If you want.”

“Really? You don’t mind?”

He scratched the back of his neck. “I don’t love watching people look at my stuff, but I trust you not to say something terrible.” He gave me a serious look. “Even if you think it’s basic.”

“I would never.”

But as Will rummaged through his bag, I began to worry. I was terrible at faking it.

“Here.” He handed me a battered green Moleskine, then sat, elbows resting on knees, chin perched on one hand.

I started at the beginning and went slowly, studying the figures on the unlined pages. The same four characters were drawn many times over, sometimes rendered in fine black ink and sharp, confident lines and other times in scratchy pencil.

“You are good,” I said, glancing up at him, but he didn’t respond, just watched as I turned the pages.

One of the characters was dozy-eyed, slumped, and always carried a sandwich in his hand. Another wore a man bun. The one who was obviously Will was a beanpole with an exaggerated nose. One page was full of notes. He wrote in tidy capital letters.

“Ideas for strips,” Will said when I got to it.

Scattered throughout were realistic sketches of trees and bridges and everyday objects—a bowl of lemons, Will’s backpack dropped in a corner. There were a few portraits. My favorite was of a girl swimming, her hands splashing up water, a toothy smile on her face.

“This is incredible,” I told Will.

“Thanks.” He cleared his throat. “That’s my sister. It’s not always easy to find people to sit for me, so mostly I use photos. That was from our family vacation to Prince Edward Island when we were kids.”

“You can do me if you want.” I closed my eyes. “I mean, if you wanted to draw me, you could.”

Will didn’t say anything, so I opened one lid. “Was that weird? I just thought you might want the practice.” I picked up another slice of sourdough, examining the holes with new fascination.

“Actually, I’d like that.”

I peered up from the bread. “Really? So how do we do this? Do you want me to put a chair over there?” I motioned to the other side of the room, near the door.

Will took the piece of bread from my hands and set it on the plate. He looked around the space, his eyes settling on the bed. “No. You go there.”

—

It started with me at the head of my bed and Will on a chair by the foot. He turned to a fresh page, staring at it for a full minute and then at me, first my face and then the rest. His hand moved across the page in quick, short strokes. He kept tilting forward, squinting at me in the darkness.

“Do you want me to move closer?” I said after his third tilt and squint.

He looked up, pausing. “Yeah, that’d be great.”

I shimmied forward. “Can we talk, or will that mess with your process?”

“We can talk.”

“How long do you usually stay when you come back to Toronto?” I hoped I wasn’t being completely obvious.

Will gave me a lickety-split smile before he went back to drawing. “Depends. This trip was a bit over a week. Usually it’s just a few days.”

Not very long, then. Not enough time to visit me up north. “Oh. Why the longer stay?”

“My dad’s getting remarried. There was an engagement party last weekend, and I hadn’t met his fiancée, so there was a lot of getting-to-know-you stuff.”

“Did it go okay?” I’d never had to navigate the ins and outs of parental love lives. If I didn’t know better, I might have believed Mom willed me into being.

“I guess. She seemed genuinely into my dad. But I wanted to be like, This guy, really? You know he washes prewashed salad, right?”

I laughed, and he thought for a moment.

“It was weird to see him with someone other than my mom. Annabel has met her a bunch of times and likes her, and my sister is a tough critic. I hope . . .” He stared down at the sketch.

“Are you all right?”

He nodded once, then looked up at me. “It bothers me. That I left, like our mom did. Dad is so hard on Annabel, but maybe when Linda moves in, things will get better.” He rubbed his eye. “Anyway, I unloaded on him last night, not that it will make a difference. It was good to have a distraction today, to not have to go home and deal with him.” Will went back to drawing.

“If you want to crash here tonight, you can,” I blurted out.

The pencil stopped.

“If you want.”

He looked up at me.

“You can.”

We watched each other, and then Will resumed sketching. Neither of us spoke for several minutes until he said, “So what’s he like—the boyfriend?”

“Jamie?” I stared at Will, trying to intuit why he was asking, but all I absorbed was the length of his eyelashes.

“Yeah. Jamie.”

“He’s great,” I said slowly. I hadn’t described Jamie to another person in such a long time, and I didn’t love the task of explaining him to Will. “He’s very chill. Funny. He’s the kind of person everyone likes—he’s the caramel pudding of humans.”

“You’ve lost me,” Will said.

I looked at the surrealist pin on his collar. “It’s kind of an inside thing—what type of dessert we’d be. He’s caramel pudding—sweet and smooth and crowd-pleasing.”

Will glanced at me. I could have sworn he was smirking. “And what about you, Fern Brookbanks? What kind of dessert would you be?”

“Me?” I swallowed. “Jamie thinks I’m a lemon tart.”

I watched Will’s chest rise and fall. He tipped his head toward his book. “And what do you think I’d be?”

I could taste Peter’s salted chocolate torte, that hint of chili. “I dunno . . . a chocolate log?”

“Chocolate log?”

“Yeah. You know, with the chocolate wafers and whipped cream?” I should have thought before I’d opened my mouth.

“Uh-huh,” Will said. “What else?”

I knew he didn’t mean what else about the log. I took a deep breath.

“I’ve known Jamie for a long time, but he was always just an older lake kid.”

Will glanced at me. “How much older?”

“Three years. His family has a cottage near the resort. Anyway, I was kind of a mess at the end of high school, and Jamie and I were working together. He was the only person who didn’t judge me.” Will looked up from his drawing. “That was the beginning.”

“Four years ago?”

“Right. We work together at the resort every summer. Jamie stays in the staff cabins instead of his family’s cottage because he likes it there so much.” I picked at the blue polish on my index finger. “I do not relate.”

“That’s not the sense I got.”

“Are you serious?” Had I not explained to him how I didn’t want to go back to the resort?

“Yeah. At the gallery today . . . and the way you spoke about it. I don’t know. I got the impression you love it up there.”

I blinked at him. In so many ways, I did. I loved watching a storm move across the lake. I loved hanging out in the pastry kitchen with Peter, and playing cribbage with the Roses, and taking a kayak out on a still day. “Maybe.”

I stared down at my hands. Things had been better with Mom since I moved in here before the start of my second year of university. I never appreciated her Type-A-ness, but the day she and Peter helped me unpack, she attacked scrubbing and organizing the apartment as if it were a military operation. In one afternoon, the burnt cheese was scoured from the stove; the bathroom tile grout was revealed as white, not gray; and each of my pots, pans, and utensils had been washed and assigned a home. I was grateful and tired when we were done, but instead of them going back to their hotel room, Mom suggested the three of us celebrate. We sat outside at a little restaurant on the end of my street and ordered pizza and red wine and reminisced about the summer. It felt like we were a normal family having a night out, and I guess we were. When Mom dropped me off at my dorm the year prior, I couldn’t shove her out the door fast enough. But I clung to her as we hugged goodbye that night, wishing she could stay a little while longer.

“If I didn’t go home . . .” I shook my head. “It’s not an option.”

“And what about Jamie? You haven’t told him?”

“No. I can’t see that going over well. I think Peter is the only person I could talk to.” I thought about the playlist he’d made me. “He probably already suspects anyway. He knows me better than anyone.”

“You love him?”

I glanced at Will, surprised.

“Peter? Yeah. He’s the closest thing I have to a dad.”

“I meant Jamie.”

I didn’t intend to leave a gaping pause, but he’d caught me off guard. “Of course. I wouldn’t be with him if I didn’t.”

He nodded.

“Are you in love with Fred?”

“No,” he said without hesitation. After a second he added, “I thought I might have been. But I’ve realized I’m not.”

I wanted to know how he figured that out and when, and why they were still together if that was the case. But asking those questions seemed dangerous. Instead, we both went quiet, and I watched the candlelight flicker against Will’s cheeks, getting lost in its hollows.

The rain fell harder, hitting the window sideways. Eventually, Will’s hand stilled.

“I’m worried you’re going to hate it,” he said.

“Honestly, me too.”

He shifted to the edge of the bed. I scooted beside him. I left a few inches of space between us, but I could feel the heat of his body, smell the rain in his hair and the paint on his clothes.

I leaned over the page, and there I was, captured in fine strokes of graphite, in shadow and light. The illustration was careful and detailed, the focus clearly on me, the bed and room blurring out around me. My chin rested on my knees, arms wrapped around my shins, feet bare. There was a slight upward slant to my lips, my eyes widened in a kind of secretive delight.

“You have this look when you’re excited about something—I was trying to get that.” He ducked his head so he could read the expression on my face. “Your nose was hard, too.”

“My nose?” I brushed my fingers over it.

“How did I do? Do you hate it?”

I shook my head. “No. It’s . . .” I wanted to explain how it felt as if no one had really seen me before that moment, but all I came up with was, “It’s me.”